@wall thing.........Fixed fortifications are monuments to human stupidity - napoleon bonaparte. Also sometimes attributed to helmuth moltke the elder.
Though the great wall did succeed partly in warding of the huns...the chinese emperor would have been better off creating a army with that expense,as i remember the great wall fell when the defenders deserted and surrendered without even fighting...proving right the proverb a wall is only as good as the man behind it.The romans used walls to deadly effect,but only as long as its infantry remained world class..when they declined not all the walls could wrad of the barbarian invasions.
Same for the french army and its maginot line.
Onto battles,this is a real problem for me as there are so many.
However i did make a list.
Just for fun, I've put a star next to my own picks.
1.Cannae*
THE cannae,every generals wet dream from the day it was fought.
2.Austerlitz*
Deception,outnumbered,total battlefield mastery ,manuevre,surprise,
second greatest in my book.
3.Pharsalus.
Caesar's greatest victory.
4.Battle of walaja
Khalid ibn al waleed's double envelopment.Superb victory.
5.Battle of gaugamela*.
Alexander's greatest victory.
6.Leuctra*
The first oblique angle victory.
7.Sedan.
The original german
kesselschacht battle.
8.alesia
Caesar's great use of circumvillation.
I kept off sieges, because there were so many of them, and so disputable.
9.yamrouk
Yarmouk?
Khalid ibn al waleed's superb use of cavalry to gain local superiority at all points of importance and defeating the numerically larger enemy in detail.
10.Mohi*
subotai's great victory.
11.Trasimene
greatest ambush in military history.
Differences:
Pharsalus,
Walaja,
Sedan,
Alesia,
Yarmouk;
I had suggested
Dara,
Breitenfeld,
Blenheim,
Rossbach and
Narva.
For extended possibles.
My choices
Battle of fraustadt.Another of the few classic examples of a deliberate double envelopment.Swedish victory.
A nice surprise; a relatively less-known Swedish battle.
Battle of blenheim.Marlbrough's best.
On my first list!
Battle of rivoli.The most brilliant victory of the italian campaign
Best of the Young Napoleon (before Egypt).
Battle of dresden.Brilliant use of the counterattack flanking manuevre by napoleon with massive allied casualities.
I REALLY don't know; it was a scrappy, messy battle, more a battle of attrition than a battle of manoeuvre. My personal two cents, of course.
Battle of breitenfield.Gustavas adolphus signature victory.
Yes! And Leuthen?
Battle of freidland,napoleon's great victory over russia.
Noooooooo. Another, like Leipzig and Dresden, from the tired, post-Austerlitz Napoleon.
Battle of hydaspes,tactically one of alexander's best.
I strongly doubt the authenticity of this battle. There is enough evidence to show that things may not have gone as, for instance, Arrian reported the matter. Alexander had not till date spared the life of a single king opposing him; his magnanimity in this single case is suspicious. The behaviour of the old troopers is significant. Finally, it is bizarre that Alexander should have given away the lands of an allied king, Ambhi, to a defeated king, Paurava. On balance, I strongly suspect the authenticity of the reporting. The incredibly clever bits about the distractions at the original crossing, the midnight march, the river-crossing using the mid-river island, the final battle are all fine, but this was not one of Alexander's Persian battles; if anything, it was one of his hill-fort battles. Let me explain.
The Alexandrian formation was not accidental, it was not an act of genius by Philip II; it was an evolution. It was evolved to solve two military problems: Greek hoplites meeting each other; Greek hoplites meeting Persian massed levies. It had a specific technical function for each of its parts, and none of these technical functions were used in this battle.
To begin with, the Greek hoplite vs. hoplite problem.
The Greeks found early on that two hoplite armies face to face and of roughly equal numbers had little advantage over one another. The Spartans, being fitter and stronger than the rest, enjoyed the same advantages over the other Greeks as the forward pack of the English Rugby team would have over a Calcutta Police side. That gave them a huge advantage over the others, and until the strange affair on the island of Sphakteria, nobody beat a Spartan. Sometime after the Peloponnesian War, which ended in 404 BC, to be precise, after their revolt against the Spartans and the Spartan party in Thebes in 378 BC, Epaminondas (born c. 418 BC) brought about a change in tactics which proved decisive. The first trial at Leuktra (371 BC) was decisive; the Thebans/ Boiotians won a great victory. In a nutshell, instead of two heaving, grunting masses straining for an advantage, the Thebans greatly strengthened one wing and burst through by sheer force on that wing. The Macedonians adopted this, and also lengthened the spear, adopting the 20 ft sarissa pike. Before we come to the rest of the Macedonian formation, let us see what the Persian problem was.
The Greek hoplite first encountered the Persian levy army when the Persian empire was busy overrunning the Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor. On the relative flat plains of Anatolia, the large numbers of the Persians allowed them to cover both sides of the Greek line, and to simply envelop it by numbers. Second, the Persians had cavalry; although many of the Greek cities had cavalry contingents, manned by the richer class of citizen, the Greek topography didn't allow the luxury of building a mounted contingent. There was simply insufficient space for stud farms and horse-breeding. Only Thessaly and the northern plains had horse-breeding and were known as being strong in cavalry. These areas mostly went under Persian control pretty early in each invasion, and the Greeks fought with vestigial cavalry on most occasions. The results were clear; at Marathon, they blocked off the passes, held back, and attacked only when the Persians re-embarked their cavalry. At Plataia, they held back, hoping that the Persians would attack their position on the high slopes of the hill on which the city was built. This did not happen; they marched to a forward position, and still nothing happened, other than painful cavalry raids on their positions, so they planned a retreat to their older positions. The Persians, mistaking this planned retirement for a move to run from the battlefield, attacked, giving the Greeks exactly the opportunity they wanted, where they wanted it, on the slopes, the Persians climbing, the Greeks above them. When the Greek armoured infantry met the thinly-armed Persian infantry, the issue was never in doubt.
So when they could, the Greeks avoided battle; they avoided exposure to enemy cavalry, and they avoided charges except over the last 200 yards, within arrowshot.
In response to this, the Macedonians adapted their phalanx to allow massed cavalry attack at one point of the long enemy line, assault infantry to exploit the cavalry breakthrough, and a massed phalanx to pin down the rest of the enemy line. The armour was modified and made much lighter, allowing the army to march at a much higher speed. This is what happened in the classic battles against the Persians.
The point of all this: which part of the Macedonian formation came in useful against the Indian formation?
First, the horse-archer attack on the Indian left flank cavalry. Horse-archers? Where did they figure ever before? Did Alexander use formations outside the Macedonian classic elements in any other battle? Did he, in short, innovate in terms of formation or new arms ever before?
Second, the Indian right flank cavalry galloped to the rescue of the beleaguered right flank. Quite possible.
Third, without the cavalry cover, Koinos' cavalry found the Indian rear quite exposed and pressed home its charges. This is a new development. There is nothing wrong with a tactical innovation; it is just that this battle is full of them, and it is the battle which is least authenticated.
Fourth, the Indian collapse is supposed to be due to their attempts to face both sides, form a double phalanx, which proved to be too
difficult to execute in the teeth of enemy attack. Quite possible, but was it within the realms of probability?
So what did we see? The elite cavalry, the elite Companion infantry, the Macedonian phalanx, the light cavalry: how were they engaged? None of what was done earlier:
- a frontal attack with the elite cavalry: did not happen;
- exploitation by the elite infantry: not attempted, since there was no breach in the enemy line to break through;
- follow-up and break-through by the remaining elements, including the phalanx engaged in pinning down the rest of the forces: did not happen;
Instead we have
- a flank attack by mounted archers;
- an attack on the rear of the enemy line by a cavalry detachment;
- a general attack by both sections of the enveloping forces on the pinned-down Indian line;
My conclusion from this is that Alexander may have attempted innovations and tactical departures from the usual pattern of set-piece battles that his veterans were familiar with. He may have worked this out due to the presence of an unknown factor, the war-elephants. It is probable that while the veterans would have executed a normal Companion cavalry + Companion infantry + Phalanx infantry attack with practised ease, they fumbled this new plan. They fumbled because they were at the end of their endurance; because they had not fought set-piece battles since Gaugamela, and had spent their time in between on storming hill-forts, a completely different kind of battle. They fumbled because this was not a manoeuvre or a set of moves which they were familiar with, or had worked out on drills.
Is there any other evidence? If the Indian formation had not been effective, it would not have been adopted extensive throughout the Hellenistic world: by the Diadochi, through the Sandrocottus/Chandragupta gift of 300 elephants to Seleukos, through Demeter of Macedonia to his brother-in-law, Pyrrhus of Epirus, through Pyrrhus of Epirus to Hannibal, the great enemy of Rome. Only a successful idea would be adopted, surely. Does it need more than this rage for elephants to point to us that Hydaspes was at best a draw?
But what about Austerlitz' original point that this was a brilliant tactical battle? If this was in fact what happened, and if Greek and Roman propaganda did not distort the reality and bring in incorrect reports of an outstanding success, if there was no embroidering of the facts, we may conclude that Alexander came out with brilliant battle planning, the grand tactics part of it, and with a series of truly outstanding manoeuvres, which deserved a better fate than the draw which I suggest actually happened. That too because he was dealing with an exhausted force, which had reached the end of its tether. It could not go forward another step; the thought of an emperor behind this king of a small marcher kingdom filled their hearts with despair, and they even turned against their beloved king and refused to listen to his pleas for more.
Battle of hohenfreidberg.Greatest victory of the war of austrian succesion.
Agreed, although all the victories by Frederick were pretty hot.
Battle of leuthen.Greatest victory of the seven yrs war.
Noooo; you left out my favourite, Rossbach. Quite honestly, Rossbach was a brilliant cavalry battle. You're prejudiced, Austerlitz!
h.mention;Battle of ramillies/battle of salamanca
Testing us, right? Lepanto? St. Vincent? Trafalgar? Tsushima? Hint, hint./battle of aurestadt.
If it is Auerstadt you have in mind, that is one of the middle Napoleon, tired-old-man battles. I don't know; it is with a sinking feeling that one studies these later battles and realises that Napoleon was burning out rapidly.
Now i have deliberately left out 20th century battles as battles ceased to be battles and more resembled operations due to the numbers available from ww1 onwards.
So stalingrad,kharkov,kiev.....are not on the list.
